1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejection control device, a liquid ejection device, and a liquid ejection control method.
2. Related Art
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application 2004-25551, for example, discloses a printing device equipped with a plurality of recording heads (the liquid ejection unit) for ejecting out ink. With this printing device, a plurality of print heads and drive controllers (head drive circuit) provided corresponding to these print heads are installed on a carriage. The main body of the printing device is provided with a plurality of data processors (image processors; processing unit) for transferring data to the drive controllers. The data processors subject print data received by the printing device to processing, and perform data processing that produces head control data that can be used by the recording heads.
With printing devices, such as serial printers or lateral printers, it is known that a carriage is moved a plurality of times (a plurality of passes) in a direction that intersects the conveyance direction of the paper or other such target, while ink droplets are ejected from the nozzles of the moving recording heads, thereby printing an image on the target. In this case, nozzle rows, in which a plurality of nozzles (such as 180 or 360) that are perpendicular to the reciprocal movement direction of nozzle formation faces of the recording heads (faces that are opposite the target) are arranged at a specific pitch, are formed for each color.
With this type of printing device, print data is sequentially received as a packet (compressed data) from a host device, and the received print data is successively stored in a reception buffer. The data processors extract the print data and separate the print image data and commands included therein, analyze the commands, and successively store the print image data in an intermediate buffer. The data processors perform, for example, vertical-horizontal conversion processing in which the arrangement order of the pixels of print image data (data read order) is converted from a horizontal arrangement order used for display into a vertical (nozzle row direction) arrangement order that matches the ejection order in which the ink droplets are ejected from the recording heads, to produce head control data (head image data), which is stored in a print buffer. Then, the head control data is successively transferred, one pass at a time, from the print buffer to the recording heads, and drive circuits within the recording heads perform ejection control in which ink droplets are ejected out of the nozzle rows based on the head control data, thereby printing an image. With a line printer, the only difference is that there is no vertical-horizontal conversion processing, and the data for each processing stage is successively stored in each buffer by the same flow.